He looked upon this group as an orchestra: one where each chair was playing a different instrument, interpreting the score on their own terms, quite often seeing themselves as soloists, and ignoring or trying to drown out the other players whenever possible.
His title was Science Master, but he saw himself as conductor, and his mission as coaxing a sweet symphony from what all too often lapsed into atonal noise. Assignments, equipment and resource disposition, scheduling, information exchange, data review, and acting as methodology watchdog were all within his purview.
Having one member of the Expedition come up missing was bad enough. That the missing member was one he would gladly have done without in the first place was enough to put his most recent round of ulcer treatments to the acid test.
Professor Maud Whalsitz. “Old Whaletits” behind her back to one and all, thanks in part to her Hindenburgesque bosom.
Maud was not one of the best minds Earth had produced. She had managed to bully and backstab her way onto the periphery of the team of scientists who had worked with the Whuggs to create Why Not U, through vile force of personality mutated that into Full Tenure, and pretty much coasted since then. Her research was sloppy, her record-keeping haphazard, her conclusions ill-founded and generally wrongheaded. Although ostensibly an exothropologist, what little work she did produce fairly bristled with contempt for alien races. Anytime Arthur learned that she had finagled a berth on one of his Expeditions he immediately categorized her as Excess Baggage.
A hack like her would have been tolerable were she just another doddering, mossbacked chair-warmer dozing toward retirement. But the sewage ripple ice cream topping on the toxic waste cake was Maud being a Pyg.
Pygs—followers of the late and largely unlamented Alexi “The Human Landfill” Pyg—literally lived to throw their weight around, fanatically following a perverse self-help regimen constructed around a variation on a very old joke: Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit?
The answer was, of course, Anywhere she wants! Pygs used a variety of means to become as grossly huge as humanly possible. Not huge like your Aunt Flo whose weakness for Sara Lee has kept her from seeing her toes for the past ten years, but huge as in big enough to give the owner of a freak show nightmares. A dedicated Pyg made a sumo wrestler look like a slat-ribbed anorexic. Within the Pyg community a member who tipped the scales at a mere seven hundred pounds was suspected of backsliding.
The logic behind this flabulous form of body modification was to have more weight to throw around than anyone else, and keep what you had glommed by becoming an immovable object. But that was only one cracked facet of Pygism. They also cultivated a calculated slovenliness, and the sort of obnoxiousness of habit and personality guaranteed to make everyone around them adopt a hands-off policy.
The reason Maud got a seat—several seats, actually—on any Expedition she wanted to join was because nobody at University Central back on Earth wanted her around, and they kept hoping that one of these times she might not come back.
It was beginning to look like this time they might just get their wish.
“There she is,” Arthur said, as if there were any way Claire could miss her. On the screen before them what looked like an overinflated parade balloon with orange hair and green teeth waddled into view, her rolling jostling territories sheathed in enough lime green stretch fabric to Christo a minivan. Only the Whugg gravtwister bracelet on one hamlike wrist allowed her to move under her own power.
“When was this?” Claire asked from behind Arthur s shoulder.
He peered at the datatrack on the bottom of the screen. “Yesterday afternoon, around two.”
“Then she’s been gone for over twenty-four hours. Still, you wouldn’t think she could have gone too far away.”
“It’s doubtful. I’ve never seen her walk more than twenty steps without bitching about it.”
The big woman lumbered toward a tree-like growth with a triple helical trunk and blobby lavender leaves. A scowl appearing on the jowly porcine puddle of her face, she lowered herself to her knees.
“What do you think? Her daily exercise routine or prayer?” Claire asked with a chuckle.
“No, she’s—” He leaned closer to the screen. “She’s digging.”
“So she is. What kind of tree is that?”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t say. Maud had been sending me squat back at the mothership. Some stills and half-assed descriptions. That’s how I found out she was out of contact. I was trying to tell her to get the lead out.”
Whalsitz unearthed a breadloafsized black pod or nodule from the reddish ground. Tucking it under one arm she fiddled with her wristlet and levitated straight up, unfolded her legs and settled back onto her loafered feet like a spacecraft carved from moldy suet.
She went back to the center of the clearing, wrapped her sausage fingers around the bundle of fibers at one end of the pod and pulled. The pod opened lengthways, iridescent aqua bubbles foaming out of the opening. The bubbles swelled and popped, and the big woman wrinkled her flat nose in distaste. Her mouth began moving.
“Would you please dial up the sound?” Claire asked.
“Sure.” He leaned forward and tapped a pad.
“—Strom’s jockstrap?” Whalsitz rumbled. She sneezed violently, wiped her nose on her sleeve, then stared expectantly around her.
“Any idea what she’s doing, Claire?”
She shook her head. “The experts are baffled.”
Several minutes passed, Maud clearly growing impatient with waiting. Then they heard a faint and far-off new sound which had been captured on the recording, a distant subterranean rumble. Whalsitz’s head turned and she peered off in that direction, her piggy eyes narrowing to slits.
“According to sensor readings that was a leviathan approaching the area,” Arthur murmured tightly. The rumble continued to grow louder, like an oncoming avalanche.
“Sounds bigger than a breadbox.”
“Bigger than an elephant. According to what little data Maud did send, at adult stage leviathans are about eleven meters long and eat over half a ton of vegetation a day.”
“Sounds like my old seafood diet. It sees food, it eats it. The thing’s still coming toward her.”
He nodded. “Two hundred meters and closing.”
“Whaletits isn’t running away.”
Arthur let out an uneasy laugh. “Do you think she even could?”
Claire leaned over his shoulder and toggled a wider view.
“Well,” she chuckled as she straightened up, “If the old blob had any run in her, seeing that thing coming should have brought it out big time.”
The leviathan was big enough and ugly enough to unnerve even a Pyg. Roughly resembling a terrestrial catfish the size of a humpback whale with a truncated, unpiscene aft section, it had tiny brown eyes, an under-slung jaw, and big rubbery lips stir-rounding a maw large enough for a garage door. It was obviously a land animal; there were six muscular, splayfooted legs on each side. Warty leathery skin covered its broad back, and a long, absurdly fuzzy tail brought up the rear.
This less than lovely creature was powering toward Professor Whalsitz like a mutant locomotive at a good 30 kph. She faced the thing squarely, multiple chins momentarily quivering with consternation.